Google’s definition of doorway pages

Google does not like doorway pages. In a webmaster hangout on YouTube, Google’s John Mueller gave is own definition of doorway pages.

“A doorway page would be if you have a large collection of pages where you’re just tweaking the keywords on those pages for that. If you have one page that links out to a bunch of other pages and that’s just like a kind of a sitemap page,something like that. […]

If you focus on a clear purpose for the page that’s outside of just ‘I want to rank for this specific variation of the keyword’ then that’s usually something that leads to a reasonable result.

Whereas if you’re just taking a list of keywords and saying ‘I need to make pages for each of these keywords and each of the permutations that might be for two or three of those keywords’ then that’s just creating pages for the sake of keywords which is essentially what we look at as a doorway.”

You can view the video here:

How does Google define doorway pages?

“Doorways are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. They are bad for users because they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination. They can also lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.

Here are some examples of doorways:

Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page

Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s)

Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy

How to optimize the pages of your website

You shouldn’t create pages just for ranking purposes. The pages of your website should make sense to human visitors. If the pages make sense to human visitors, Google will also like them.

Of course, you can make sure that Google indexes your pages for the right keywords, and you can make sure that Google can easily parse your pages. The web page optimization tools in SEOprofiler help you to do that. If you haven’t done it yet, try SEOprofiler now: